A sudden, but perhaps unsurprising, bit of e-book M&A today in the UK: the music and entertainment company HMV is selling its 64 percent stake in e-book retailer Anobii to the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, for the princely sum of �1 ($1.55).The deal will give Sainsbury’s a jump start into the e-book market as part of its stated strategy of becoming a bigger player in the digital media business. It has been gradually building this up since 2010, although without much fanfare: in November of that year it launched its Sainsbury’s Entertainment brand; in October 2011 it bought online entertainment company Global Media Vault; and earlier this year it started its own music[...]

TechCrunch is reporting insider information that the big and much-anticipated Microsoft announcement tomorrow is an e-reader and streaming media tablet in conjunction with Barnes & Noble. If that’s true — and that’s a big if — I’m more than a little shocked by the�massive build-up and pre-launch tension-building�secrecy.Let’s be honest: Windows on a tablet is, at the moment, a loser. Currently, Windows is a tiny, insignificant slice of the tablet market. There’s hope in Redmond, and maybe even belief, that this will change soon, but no-one else is holding their breath.In this chart from IDC three days ago, Windows is “other.” Get ou[...]

An awful lot of people use Amazon’s cloud services for an awful lot of things. And many of those people have pretty awful implementation practices. �That’s what the folks at Newvem are watching like a hawk.Based on Newvem’s study of Amazon users, here are the five biggest screwups they make in the Amazon cloud.Cameron Peron, Newvem’s VP of marketing and business development said most of these mistakes are just that, mistakes. �”The�most shocking thing is that nearly all of these are caused from confusion when making changes and scaling up AWS,” he said via email.Of course, Newvem, the Israeli startup, wants customers to use its analytics service to find[...]